In the early years of Super Street Fighter 2 Turobo (ST), most people rated Dee Jay bottom tier, or close to that. Over the years though, both the US and Japanese players discovered that Dee Jay wasn't so bad after all, and that he's perhaps around the middle of the pack. His cross-up medium kick is deadly. His ducking medium kick has extremely high priority and it knocks down. His "Max Out" projectile is solid, his slide is useful, and his up kicks are good at anti-air (short version) and are pretty damaging (roundhouse version).

Only two moves are different for HD Remix Dee Jay: his machine gun upper (charge down, up + punch, then mash punches) and his dread kicks (charge back, forward + kick).

Machine Gun Upper

In ST, this move requires a very precise timing of mashing punches to get all the hits: fast, but not too fast or it won’t work! Two or possibly three people in the United States can actually do this, so I figured it was time to bring machine gun uppers to the people. Now it’s very easy to mash out all the hits on this.

To compensate, the machine gun upper does much less dizzy and damage overall. Cross-up medium kick, low jab x 2, MGU is an easy, good combo though. It does a bit less damage than the slightly harder crossup medium kick, low jab x 2, stand strong, dread kicks combo.

The machine gun upper has a new property, too: it can destroy fireballs! Dee Jay’s best matches are against characters without fireballs, so this is a clever way to help him in matches where he needs help, but not affect matches where he’s already good. Some things you should know about this are that startup of the move cannot destroy fireballs (only the parts that can actually hit) and that every single hit of the move can destroy fireballs.

Most importantly though, you can charge down/back, then go to up/back + punch to perform the MGU while still retaining your charge for a max out projectile. That means when the opponent throws a fireball, you can cancel it with the MGU, then throw back your own projectile faster than you otherwise could have. On paper, this sounds strong, but in practice it’s actually quite a bit of work Dee Jay’s part to eke out a small advantage.

Also, it matters a lot which part of the MGU destroys the fireball. If you see the fireball coming, then destroy it with the MGU, you’re still going to have to go through with the rest of the MGU before you can throw your own max out. It’s a lot more effective if you guess the fireball and do your MGU early so that the very end of it destroys the fireball. That way, you can throw your max out immediately after. But if you’re doing the MGU that early, the opponent can counter by doing nothing or jumping in or throwing a delayed fireball. It’s an interesting guessing game, but during playtest, it was never really dominating.

Dread Kicks

In ST, the time between the two hits of this move is so big that even if you hit with the first hit, the second one hardly ever connects. You can even get dragon punched between these two kicks. In HD Remix, the second kick comes out faster so that it almost always combos. To compensate, each hit does less damage. You can think of it somewhat like Bison’s scissor kick in that it’s a pressure move that does two ticks of block damage.

In ST, the short version of the dread kicks (which hits only once) can go over low attacks. In HD Remix, the medium and roundhouse dread kicks have this same property. This is probably Dee Jay’s biggest upgrade as it makes it pretty scary to try to sweep him or slide at him. Dee Jay already had good pokes, so adding an anti-sweep move is nothing to scoff at. Note to the curious: the medium and roundhouse Dread Kicks do not go over Sagat’s low fireballs, sorry.

Conclusion

Dee Jay gained a few tricks, but stayed close to his roots. For 14 years, he was secretly a very solid character and these upgrades keep him secretly solid in HD Remix.